> Six years later, it less and less “Just Works”, started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn’t need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I’d need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system…. GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years.So… it’s not just me. Somewhere between Snow Leopard and Mavericks I started finding building various things from source that never were a problem became an exercise in figuring out what library had been removed or moved or what Apple had done with lib/header paths or something else.

If people aren’t going over to another unix, what are they doing? Homebrew? Container-ing or virtualizing another unix? Or just suffering?

Since 2008 or 2009 I work on Apple hardware and OS: back then I grew tired of Linux desktop (which is going to be MASSIVE NEXT YEAR, at least since 2001), and switched to something that Just Works. Six years later, it less and less Just Works, started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn’t need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I’d need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system. I am finding myself turning away from GUI programs that I used to appreciate, and most of the time I use OSX to just run a terminal, Firefox, and Emacs. GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years. Again, this is from a sysadmin/developer kind of power user perspective; power user, whose definition of “fun” includes spending 6 hours in the middle of the night figuring how to get dual boot working with UEFI.

User Eric McCorkle gives us an update on his FreeBSD on the Librem notebook. He started the project in this post back in April on getting the FreeBSD operating system set up on Librem, a laptop that caters to freedom and privacy.

I’ve been working on my FreeBSD setup for Purism’s Librem 13 laptop ever since receiving it back in April. I’m relatively pleased with the way things have progressed, and most of the critical issues have been addressed. However, the setup still has a way to go in my opinion before it gets to the point of being the “ideal” setup.

Current State

Three of the four critical issues I identified back in April have been addressed:

Matt Macy’s i915 graphics patch works well on the Librem 13, and I personally made sure that the suspend/resume support works. The patch is very stable on the Librem, and I’ve only had one kernel panic the entire time testing it.

The HDMI output Just Works™ with the i915 driver. Even better, it works for both X11 and console modes.

Full support for the Atheros 9462 card has been merged in. I’ve had some occasional issues, but it works for the most part.

The vesa weirdness is obviated by i915 support, but it was resolved by using the scfb driver.

This blog post by user Eric McCorkle shows us how he got FreeBSD set up on his Librem notebook. He explains what was successful and what things a user should look out for. Librem is described as a laptop that fully respects your right to free and open source software.

When the Librem laptops were announced last year, I was quite excited and I ordered both the 15 and 13-inch models. My 13-inch model arrived last week, and I have begun the process of porting FreeBSD to it.

I have to say, I am very excited to finally have a laptop from a fully-cooperative manufacturer, where I can get my hands on all the hardware specs and possibly even upstream fixes. This is a very welcome boon after a decade of having to deal with flaky BIOS issues, black-box hardware, and other difficulties.

The first thing I do when I get a new laptop is poke around in the BIOS menu (no photos yet). The librem has a coreboot port, but I decided to get FreeBSD installed and check the system out a bit before diving into the art of flashing my BIOS, so I was looking at the proprietary American Megatrends BIOS menu. Even still, I was pleased by the features it presented, most notably the ability to set up custom signing keys. I am going to have to do some work on a signed FreeBSD boot and loader chain.